The Bride Who Wore Red

If white is the color of, if not virginity, at least tradition, what does scarlet stand for? Nell Freudenberger said yes to the dress that felt not like the costume for some age-old role—but like being herself.

Courtship is famously bad preparation for marriage. But shopping for a wedding dress is good preparation for a wedding, in that the fantasy in your head is very unlikely to occur just as you imagine it. When I got engaged, I had in the back of my mind an afternoon spent in elegant Manhattan bridal salons, trying on breathtaking gowns while my mother and sister gasped, exclaimed, and perhaps dabbed their eyes with tissues. Afterward we would enjoy lunch at an uptown sidewalk café. I hate shopping, and the relationship between my mother and sister is delicate at best, but still the idea persisted—part of a general wedding fantasy that had probably been percolating since I was five years old.

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At about that age, I can remember playing dress-up in my mother's wedding gown: a purple taffeta mini dress with a chiffon overlay and a stiff Elizabethan collar, made for her by the costume designer at the repertory theater where my father was directing at the time. On me, the dress fell to the floor, and with its purple satin sash and appliquéd floral design, it was perfect for playing princess or fairy, if not exactly right for "bride."

My mother described this dress to the young sales girls on the day we started shopping for my dress, adding the joking caveat: "It was the '70s." The salesgirls nodded politely; if they knew the decade, it was from the recent finale of That '70s Show. My mother had married before, in a long white dress at age 22; the marriage had lasted only a year and a half. The purple dress was meant to be dramatic, fun, and, most of all, different from what had come before, like the decade of its creation. By the time I started searching for a dress for myself, though, it looked temporary and a little outlandish. My mother and sister and I visited three bridal salons that day—classic establishments where I climbed onto wooden boxes in dress after dress, expecting to be transformed.

"It's a pretty dress," my mother would say. "But I'm not sure it does anything for you." Or: "I think you could do better." Every time she offered one of these assessments, my sister rolled her eyes and silently mouthed: "I love it." But my mother was right: White isn't my color, and with my basically straight figure (breastless, waistless, hipless), most of them were unflattering. We didn't find a dress that day, and if we went out to lunch, I have succeeded in erasing it from my memory.

Like many men and women of my generation, who are as likely to have divorced parents as not, I was terrified of marriage.

My husband and I talked about our parents' divorces on our first date: Both marriages had been tumultuous, and the divorces that concluded them were drawn-out and messy. Talking about them was easy, though, and oddly romantic. The upside to watching the marriage you know best blow up is that the pitfalls seem tragically clear; the downside is that you know exactly how hard it is to avoid them.

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About a year after we first met, I broke up with him without warning and then spent the next 24 hours crying about it. When my best friend asked why I'd done it, I said I was afraid I was wasting time—that he wasn't the person I was going to marry. Looking back, I think it was probably the opposite: I was afraid because I knew he was. The next morning I appeared at his door at 6:30 a.m., begging for forgiveness with lilacs and bagels.

Courtesy of the author

My husband is in many ways the man I'd always hoped to marry: He is open-minded and kind, with a sarcastic sense of humor. He's older than I am, like a lot of the men I dated in the past; unlike most of them, he's an architect rather than a writer. (Many wonderful couples include two writers, but I've concluded that I supply enough self-involved neurosis for one household.) He is also tall and lanky, just my type, with a craggy kind of handsomeness. The only thing that wasn't as I imagined was his hair: I'd never pictured myself with a redhead.

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My mother, who really does have a good eye (in spite of that purple dress), thought we ought to try Morgane Le Fay. I'd always loved looking in the windows, and I figured my wedding was the only occasion for which I might be able to justify shopping there. The dresses were organized in the store by beautiful, unusual color and distinguished by a lot of chiffon, netting, and meticulous details: a row of tiny covered buttons or corset lacing at the back of a sash. Basically they were dresses that rocked, but in a totally ladylike way. I put one on, walked out of the dressing room, and thought I'd found it. It was ivory chiffon, with a round neck and cap sleeves, a narrow band of transparent fabric from the neckline to the waist, and a tiered flamenco skirt with a net crinoline. I loved it, and my mother agreed that it "did something" for me. We had almost decided when she pulled from the rack its twin, only in a deep scarlet. The crinoline was red satin, with black netting underneath.

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"Who gets to wear that dress?" I asked.

"Try it on," my mom said. "Just for fun."

Red is a better color for me than white; more important, when I stepped out of the dressing room, I felt like myself—albeit a much more fabulous version. As if on cue, my favorite Belle and Sebastian song started playing over the sound system. Suddenly it meant something to me that my mother had worn purple and I would wear red; her marriage to my father hadn't lasted, but it would be hard for either of us to call it a failure. And the dress was the color brides traditionally wear in India and China: Red symbolizes good fortune in those cultures, in which white is considered funereal. Both places had meant a great deal to me in my work, and I'd always thought Indian brides, with their red saris and delicately painted hands, were the most beautiful. I was hardly going to get away with a sari, but it took me only a few moments to edit the film of the wedding in my head to include a bride in red.

I had decided not to tell my husband that I was going to wear red, but I said that the dress would be a surprise. I did tell our friends, who got creative with their gifts: We received a set of sheets with our nicknames (too embarrassing to reveal here) embroidered in red thread, and my husband's groomsmen got him a custom surfboard inscribed with my first name in crimson script. The wedding was to be held where we'd met, at a friend's farm on Long Island in September, and so the color was seasonally appropriate as well.

There are many moments when you're supposed to "know" you've met the right person: at first sight, on the first date, at the proposal. If I'm honest with myself, I wasn't completely sure at any of those times. The night before the ceremony I couldn't sleep, and the next morning my nervousness hadn't abated. It wasn't until I was standing at the bottom of a hill—waiting to walk through a field where we'd camped together for the past three summers—that I knew. I can describe it only by saying that a kind of calm descended on me: a feeling of being the person I am when I'm alone, only not alone anymore.

I was no longer afraid that I was marrying the wrong person, but I was a little bit afraid that the right person—standing in front of a copper arch that he'd made himself, and that matched the color of his hair in the sun—was going to hate the dress. When he saw me, he looked down and laughed, as if he thought he should have guessed, and then back to me with a smile of recognition that made it clear he couldn't care less what I was wearing. That moment of humor and connection, in the midst of all the fuss, is what I remember best about our wedding—one thing that was even better than I'd expected.